Nashville Startup Jamplify Exhibiting At DEMO Courtesy Of Startup America

As we reported earlier this morning, Startup America revealed the 8 startups that won their contest for a free trip to DEMO in Santa Clara California this week. Four startups are exhibiting in the DEMO Showcase Pavilion. The other four startups are presenting on the main stage.

Nashville Jumpstart Foundry graduate Jamplify was one of the four startup selected for the exhibit space in the DEMO Showcase Pavillion.

Jamplify is a hybrid, promotional, crowdsourcing platform. With Jamplify’s finished product, you get the most logical promotional vehicle for bands, musicians, and bloggers that’s available to date.

Jamplify crowdsources people for promoting the bands that they love. Rather than crowdsourcing for actual capital Jamplify is crowdsourcing for social capital and human capital, and then there’s the payoff.

Jamplify is like the kickstarter for fan based, crowd based musical promotion. As a fan of a band or a promotional ambassador you can agree to promote a band or musician. Based on your social graph and the amount of people that you actually touch with the campaigns short, trackable url you will become eligible for prizes from the band or artist you’re promoting.

Jamplify arrived at Nashville’s Jumpstart Foundry from New York City where the founders worked on Wall Street.

Check out their video pitch from Jumpstart Foundry’s demo day in August below:

Linkage:

Check out Jamplify here

DEMO here

Startup America here

Everywhere Else here

New York Startup: Greatist The Go To Place For Health & Wellness Info INTERVIEW

I’m one of those people that thinks in order to be the best you need to think like you are the best, it’s a motivational mantra that’s driven me since my childhood. Such is the case with Derek Flanzraich and his health and wellness, socially driven info startup Greatist. This New York based startup is a destination site for original, amazingly good health and wellness content. It must be because they’re currently seeing 1.5 million uniques a month, which according to Flanzraich makes Greatist the fastest growing site in the health space.

Whether you’re looking for great healthy recipes, workout tips or even how to get over a hangover, Greatist offers a great variety of wellness and health related content.

While the content on Greatist.com is overflowing, the team at Greatist encourages their users to take it slow, one week at a time. The startups mission is to inspire and inform the world to make at least one healthier decision per week. Whether you want to lose weight, eat better, get stronger, get motivated, relieve stress, or just start working out, greatist.com offers the content you need, in an easy to read format for all of their users.

Flanzraich has been an entrepreneur since his first “lemonade stand” startup dog walking business. All the while friends, family members and new acquaintances would ask him what drove him and one of those main ingredients was health and wellness. That’s why he created Greatist.

We got a chance to talk to Flanzraich. Check out the interview below:

JustDecide Startup Dilemma Of The Week: When To Pivot

Every week we team up with New York startup Justdecide.com to bring you the Startup Dilemma Of The Week. In this feature we take dilemmas that real startups are facing and put them to the crowd using the justdecide platform to crowdsource advice for that startup.

This week’s dilemma is one that comes about naturally to startups everywhere. It can also be one of the most uncomfortable events a startup has to go through. Our startup dilemma of the week this week is “When to pivot”.

The startup that submitted this dilemma has been slowly, but steadily gaining users with their startup but they’re finding that users aren’t actively using their service. The user count goes up, and the clock ticks. A pivot is inevitable but the question that then comes in to play is when.

Pivots happen all the time, they happen in accelerators, before startups go live, in beta, in alpha, even after a startup has been established for a year or two. Facing the pivot is one of the hardest things cofounders go through. Many don’t want to abandon their original idea. Others know it’s the right thing to do but are scared about when to actually do it.

One of the biggest concerns when pivoting is will the startup lose their current user base while pivoting. Sure in the pivot you’re hopeful that you’ll gain more users but it’s scary as hell.

This week’s startup dilemma of the week offers three options:

Pivot Now

Wait a few months and make a decision

Don’t pivot for the foreseeable future.

What would you do? You can weigh in here.

Linkage:

Weigh in on this week’s Startup Dilemma of the Week

Check out previous dilemmas.

submit your own, email startups@nibletz.com

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Interview: Outgrow.me is the Marketplace for Products Successful in Crowdfunding

Outgrow.me is one of those startups that we came across and I immediately thought to myself. They are on to something. What is outgrow.me? Are you familiar with kickstarter or indiegogo – have you heard of projects that have Have you ever wondered what happened to that kickstarter or indiegogo project that you heard about weeks or months ago? Where did project end up? Is it possible to find the High Roller Adult Big Wheel or the Pebble after the hype has died down? What option follows a successful crowdfunding campaign?

Those questions are finally being answered with Outgrow.me. It’s the solution that was just waiting to be created. We talked to Sam Fellig the founder of outgrow me read below.

What is outgrow.me?

“Outgrow.me is an online marketplace for successfully crowdfunded projects.”

In layman’s terms, how does it work?

“Outgrow.me picks up where the crowdfunding platforms leave off. It’s a marketplace for successfully crowdfunded projects from all over the web. Outgrow.me offers product designers the ability to further grow their brand by marketing their products to a growing community of shoppers that support innovation, creativity, and small businesses. On the flip side, Outgrow.me offers shoppers a unique shopping experience filled with highly innovative and creative products supported by the online community.”

New York Robotics Investment Firm Makes First Startup Investment: Double Robotics

A Y-Combinator graduate and California startup, Double Robotics, is the first startup to receive an investment from New York based Grishin Robotics. Grishin was started by Dimitry Grishin who’s been dubbed the “Russian Mark Zuckerberg” by the fine folks at BetaBeat and others.

The investment into Double Robotics marks the first investment made by Grishin Robotics with more on the way. Grishin invested $250,000 into the startup.

Double Robotics has already sold 600 units ($1.2 million) of their first robotic product. The product, called Double, is a robot that puts an iPad on wheels and then gives you a mobile telecommunications device. Think that robot that Sheldon used on Big Bang Theory in the episode where he wanted Steve Wozniak’s autograph, but much more refined.

Grishin’s investment will be spent primarily on scaling, manufacturing and hiring for further development. Double Robotics plans on shipping the 600 pre-orders in the first part of 2013.

“We are thrilled to have Grishin Robotics and Dmitry Grishin, in particular, as our largest investor to date,” said David Cann, Co-founder of Double Robotics. “We read about the new investment firm and Dmitry’s experience in the field of robotics in June 2012 when the fund was announced. The timing was perfect, as we were just beginning the Y Combinator program with our prototype robot. After our public launch in August, we met with Grishin Robotics and were immediately impressed with their mission and deep knowledge of the robotics industry’s past mistakes and potential future. We look forward to working with Grishin Robotics in the years to come as we build our business.”

Grishin is the Chairman of the Board and CEO of Russian firm mail.ru who holds major investments in players like Facebook and Zynga. He became Chairman of mail.ru after global venture capitalist Yuri Milner stepped down. Grishin Robotics is Grishin’s own venture capital firm, which as you can tell from the name, invests in robotics startups.

“Investment in Double Robotics perfectly fits our strategy,” said Dmitry Grishin, founder of Grishin Robotics. “It is a consumer-oriented product with potential to fit a broad range of applications and has already generated strong consumer demand. It’s also important that the price of the product makes it accessible to the wide audience. In addition, the team has creative approach to design and is keen to build user-friendly products — both are very important focus areas for next-generation personal robotics companies. Double Robotics is well positioned to leverage the unique potential of the prominent telepresence robotics market. We have a great belief in Double Robotics team and its product.”

Linkage:

Check out Double Robotics Here

Check out Grishin Robotics Here

and check out the biggest startup event everywhere else, here

I Have An Idea For A Startup Now What: Just Decide Dilemma Of The Week

We’re back with another JustDecide.com startup dilemma of the week. We’re sure that a lot of you reading this today, had this exact same dilemma at one time or another.

” I have an idea for a startup, now what”

There are a lot of answers to this question. In the case of this startup dilemma of the week, it’s specifically about co-founders. What happens when someone has a great idea for a startup and no technical expertise. This exact dilemma can be the make it or break it point for a good idea.

In this week’s dilemma of the week there are a few good options:

Find a technical co-founder
Raise money to outsource development
teach myself to code and become my own technical co-founder.

Finding a technical co-founder can be tough. With a technical co-founder, most founders and entrepreneurs are looking for someone to work for equity. This can be a risky proposition to the designer, developer or coder that you’re considering as a co-founder. They may worry that, regardless of the great idea and their technical skills, the startup may never see revenue, or worse, funding.

On the flip side to that of course, is a proposition which could mean millions of dollars to the technical co-founder, should your startup take off.

Raising money without an actual product can be a tricky thing. It gets even harder when you’re trying to do it without an actual product, or a working demo. Outsourcing development can be an entirely separate headache as well. Who knows what you’re going to get when ou outsource and in most cases it’s hard to manage outsourced developers

The final suggestion, teaching myself to code, may seem like a great way to go, after all knowledge is power. The downside to that is regardless of who does the technical work, there will be a ton of other things for the original founder to do, outside of coding.

This startup dilemma of the week turns out to be a lot tougher than you might imagine.

Linkage:

Click here to weigh in now

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more startup stories from “everywhere else”

Are you in? You should be.

NY Startup Moment.Me Launches All Your Moments In One Easy To Use Platform

A lot of startups have tried to attack the event space. Some are concentrating on ticketing, others are concentrating on sharing the experience. Moment.me wants to be the destination for capturing the overall experience through media, in one big hub. Moment.me is looking for everyone who attends an event to have one centralized place for photos, videos and tweets of an event.

As an example, say you were attending the iHeartRadio festival in Las Vegas this weekend. If you were part of the moment.me community you could share every photo, video and tweet from the iHeartRadio festival with everyone else who was at the festival and a member of moment.me. Then, the public has one big place to see all the content that everyone has created.

“People want to see more points-of-view from their experiences and love to share because in essence, we’re social creatures,” said Ronny Elkayam, CEO and Co-Founder of Moment.me. “When we share photos, what we really intend to share are experiences, but traditional photo sharing only captures one piece of a larger puzzle. Moment.me’s mission is to enhance shared experiences with context, social connection and real-time viewing to become a window to the world’s trending moments.”

Moment.me is taking this beta launch to Singapore for the SingTel 2012 Formula 1™ Singapore Grand Prix. In addition to moments being uploaded onto the moment.me platform, they have teamed up with SingTel to show all the moments on gigantic screens in the paddock area of the race. This will be a great way to show off the platform and app and also show brands the power of such a platform.

“The mobile app will transform the way people experience popular events all over the world like the Singtel Formula 1™ Singapore Grand Prix, as well as concerts, parties and political rallies by providing simultaneous multiple perspectives of the dozens, hundreds and even thousands of others in the crowd who are tweeting, taking pictures and shooting videos. It will also allow users to find personally relevant, interesting and trending moments materializing nearby, bringing an element of social discovery to the app and a new way for marketers to connect with fans and followers.” Elkayam added.

“At Singtel, we have a constant finger on the pulse of emerging consumer technologies and understand how mobile broadband, smart phones and tablets continue to transform the way people connect with each other and the world around them,” said Mr. Loo Cheng Chuan, Head of Local L!fe, Group Digital L!fe at SingTel. “We are interested in finding a platform that could automatically fetch, match and present multiple points-of-view of this exciting event in real time. Our partnership with Moment.me will provide Formula 1™ enthusiasts a new way to view the experience that was never possible before.”

Signing up for moment.me is a breeze anyone with a valid Facebook, Google+ or Twitter account can sign up and use the service right away.

Linkage:

Check out Moment.me here at moment.me

nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more startup stories from “everywhere else”

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New York Startup: Sonar Officially Goes Android

One of our favorite startups in New York is Sonar. It may have to do with the fact that Founder and CEO Brett Martin and I grew up in the same area, or it may just happen to be that Sonar is an amazing startup. We’ve covered Sonar since their finalist appearance at TechCrunch Disrtupt 2011 and then caught up with Martin for a pretty lengthy interview a year later at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2012.

During our interview back in June Martin told us off the record that they were really close to an Android app that he was happy with and feature packed. He promised us we’d see it before the end of the summer, and low and behold he made it.

If you’re not aware of Sonar, it’s a people discovery app that helps you find and organize your people locally. They added some great functionality to the app this year which helps folks automagically do some amazing things. For instance Martin explained that with the newest iteration of their iPhone (and now Android) app Martin checks in on Sonar after he gets off of the subway. When he passes the Sonar office for the coffee shop his co-workers are alerted and they can put together their coffee order for Martin without texting or calling. Pretty magnificent huh.

Of course it’s not all about coffee. Sonar comes in really handy when you’re at a conference or convention with colleagues. We use it all the time and through Sonar we can tell when our press colleagues are near by at events.

Android has been part of the plan since Sonar’s inception however Martin and the Sonar team wanted to make sure that the app was just right. They began beta testing it in the spring and our old site was part of that beta test.

On the news of the Android release into the Google Play store Martin told nibletz:

“Launching in Google Play is a huge milestone and an amazing opportunity, with the 500M total Android activations and 1.3M more that are added daily. Sonar is the best way to connect and share with friends and interesting people nearby. We combine proprietary and third-party data to give you the best, most relevant results. By launching in Google Play and localizing in so many new countries, we’re enabling a huge new audience to spend more time connecting with their friends face-to-face.”

Now if you’re an iPhone or an Android user you can experience Sonar.

Linkage:

Sonar in the Google Play store

More about Sonar here at their website

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here’s more startup news from “everywhere else”

To Ship Or Not To Ship, That’s This Weeks Just Decide Startup Dilemma Of The Week

As you may already know nibletz.com the voice of startups “everywhere else” has partnered with New York startup JustDecide for the Startup Dilemma Of The Week. In this feature we use a dilemma that a startup from “everywhere else” has faced in the startup process. We then take that dilemma and crowdsource advice for the startup sing the JustDecide platform at JustDecide.com

This week’s Startup Dilemma Of The Week, is a dilemma that many startups face. It has to do with, when do you launch. It was brought to us by Columbus startup Resition which we featured earlier this week. Resition is a web based platform that helps displaced (laid off) workers transition to new positions.

As the startups co-founder, Mike Chapman, has explained; Resition was functionally ready to go. It is also a much needed platform. There is a direct problem, and a growing problem, that Resition handles for displaced workers. The platform runs smoothly but the design is a little rough around the edges and the feature set that Chapman hoped to roll out is still growing.

Startups across the country and around the world face this very problem every day; ” To Ship, or Not To Ship”. With statistics about startups working against all of us, the decision on when to ship your final, consumer facing product, can prove vital to a startups success. You don’t want to leave an “alpha” or a “beta” tag up too long or people grow doubtful that you will ever finish your product.

You also don’t want to pull the trigger to early. An incomplete design or a feature flaw can make a user go away and never come back.

Conversely, pitching your startup to people, crowds and investors can be exhilarating. When an entrepreneur comes up with an idea for a startup and then gets a team to buy into that idea, the internal clock starts ticking immediately. When can I get the product out.

Head on over to the Startup Dilemma Of The Week feature at justdecide.com here and help weigh in on the decision making process. Remember for the purpose of this great educational feature for startups, you need to go here to comment and weigh in. It only takes a minute and you may need the same community help one day and it’s free.

If you have a startup dilemma of the week send it to startups@nibletz.com and we’ll get in touch with you about featuring your dilemma.

JustDecide.com founder Jay Amato is working to perfect justdecide.com and they recently launched this survey, when you have a second weigh in on that as well.

Linkage:

Check out previous startup dilemmas of the week here

Check out the justdecide.com survey information here

Are you a startup “everywhere else” then you need to be here

New York Startup: JustDecide.com Needs Your Help Real Quick

Justdecide.com is a truly unique new startup born in Brooklyn New York. The startup headed by long time executive and change agent Jay Amato, is all about helping make decisions and crowd source answers. In fact we team up with JustDecide.com for a regular feature called the Startup Dilemma Of The Week.

Amato and the team at JustDecide are conducting an important, but quick survey, on internet users habits and the way they seek advice and make decisions about their career and their business.

Are your decisions influenced by friends, family members, social networks, colleagues? The series of easy to understand questions will help the JustDecide team to decide which of the many features for their platform they’re going to implement next.

Currently the justdecide.com platform has helped people with a variety of decisions, some easy, some not so much. In our feature, the Startup Dilemma Of The Week, we take a look at issues written in by various startups, that pertain to the way they are setting up their startup, or things that have happened along the way.

Justdecide.com can be about business, relationships, child raising, cooking, heck even one guy is asking advice on cable tv vs a set top box. Another dilemma this week deals with the dilemma on whether the user should pony up full price for the next iPhone or wait for an upgrade.

Any dilemma you’re facing with multiple, clearly defined possible answers will fit in the justdecide.com platform perfectly.

While JustDecide.com is great right now, Amato is looking to make it better and for that he’s turned to the startup community so please take a gander at this quick survey.

JustDecide Quick Survey

Linkage:

Check out justdecide.com here

Here are some of our Startup Dilemmas Of The Week

Are you going “everywhere else” click here

Interview With NY Startup: Marqueed Online Collaborative Visual Platform

If you could have the ultimate interior design online platform you would probably want features like, the ability to pin interior design pictures from the web, adding plans to your interior design, drawing right on top of the plans and pictures, collaborating with designers, getting feedback on your plans online from friends and family, and add comments. The ultimate interior design platform would be Pinterest meets the furniture catalog, Asana, meets Google Wave meets Facebook. Well guess what? That platform is here.

New York startup Marqueed has all of those features in a smart, graphically rich UI that also keeps all of your visual projects together in one organized place. Marqueed can be applied to just about anything visual. You could use Marqueed for do it yourself projects, recipes, landscaping, home alterations, heck even automobile customization.

The core set of functionality behind is a communication and collaborative platform around images. In the interview below with co-founder Zerna Karian she’s quick to point out that Marqueed isn’t about project management, but if enough users like it for that they would integrate with Asana or Basecamp. Karian’s other co-founder is her husband John. Both of them are career long creatives and it shows in the crisp UI and easy to use functionality.

Check out our interview with Karian below:

NY Brothers Create Startup: SwapCycles A Marketplace For Motorcycles

Whether you’re a weekend warrior on a beautiful Harley or you prefer the speed and precision of the latest Honda or BMW bike, you may have noticed one of the things that the interwebs has been lacking is a decent all in one destination designed to help riders buy and sell bikes, and of course show them off.

Brothers Daniel and Myer Amer are your run of the mill Rutgers students, passionate about business and motorcycles (which of course makes them less run of the mill). With the blessing and mentorship of their father. The elder Amer built his own contracting business from the ground up and his business principles, skills and good ole fashion elbow grease have helped the brothers launch their business.

SwapCycles online marketplace allows both power sports dealers and private individuals to list their motorcycles for sale. They’ve also created a show off feature and a social network community for motorcycle enthusiasts who can use the platform to talk shop,sports,sales, even find riding buddies across the country.

Typically when we think Silicon Alley we’re not thinking motorcycles but SwapCycles is right in the thick of it. We got a chance to talk with Daniel and Myer about SwapCycles and growing a startup, outside of the mainstream, in Silicon Alley. Check out the interview below:

Share Your Predictions For The Future With Syracuse Startup: PsyQic

It’s not everyday that you find a startup that wants to help you predict the future and share your predictions. That’s of course as long as you throw all the “weather” startups to the wayside. PsyQic a startup from Syracuse New York, does just that.

PsyQic is an iOS app that makes it easy to proclaim and than share your predictions. Do you have a prediction for next week’s NFL football games? Do you see something in the future that not everyone else sees? This may be just the app for you.

PsyQic goes beyond the predictions themselves and gamifies the process by giving you points when your predictions comes true. The points are called Qi’s which is actually a Chinese word for “spiritual energy”. Founders Gabrielle Gosselin and Keisuke Inoue wanted to design something different and fun. PsyQic fulfills just that.

Inoue and Gosselin are currently incubating their startup in upstate New York at the Syracuse Tech Garden after graduating from the Syracuse Student Sandbox this summer.

We got a chance to talk with the team behind PsyQic in the interview below:

Easily Make Citations For Your Research With NY Startup: Citelighter

We’ve been having a lot of fun using Washington DC highlighting startup, Markerly. Markerly is a simple, easy to use browser plugin that allows anyone to highlight virtually anything on the web. From there you can share it six ways to Sunday and beyond. IT’s a great platform for grabbing pieces of text and sharing them with your friends, colleagues and social networks.

New York based Citelighter works similarly to Markerly in that it allows you to highlight text on the web. Now though, instead of sharing that Citelighted content with your friends, and social networks, Citelighter compiles a bibliographical style note sheet for the end user to reference back. Citelighter is a great companion for anyone who is going to highlight something and then reference it later on.

Citelighter joins the browser plugin and highlighting space at a great time, as everyone is seeing what web browser plugins actually meet their needs.

We got a chance to interview Citelighter cofounder Lee Joki. Check out our interview below: